A.N. Wilson

JESUS

As Wilson states at the outset, the Jesus of history and the Christ of
Faith are two different beings. There have been numerous attempts to
construct a "biography" of the historical Jesus, all of which have
encountered the difficulty that the books of the New Testament were not
intended to provide that kind of information. A few scholars have gone
so far as to suppose that Jesus never existed, a view which Wilson finds
implausible. What distinguishes Wilson's approach is that he is a
novelist and a biographer, and these skills inform the way he deals with
his material.

It is central to Wilson's view that Jesus must be understood in a Jewish
context, something he makes clear in his opening chapter. Christians,
however, generally hold that Jesus was proclaiming a message to the
whole world, an idea that Wilson traces back, no doubt correctly, to
Paul, who almost certainly introduced the central Christian doctrines of
original sin and of Grace. Paul is in fact a crucial figure in the
transformation of Christianity from a Jewish sect into a world
religion, and Wilson therefore devotes the whole of his second chapter
to him. Wilson is not, of course, original in emphasizing Paul's vital
role in Christianity, but he does contribute one new suggestion: he
thinks it is possible that Paul knew or at least saw the historical
Jesus. If this was the case, Paul's failure to mention the fact then
becomes something of a puzzle, but Wilson seems to take this as
additional evidence for Paul's wish to emphasize the mystical and
visionary aspect of Jesus as opposed to his historical existence. There
seems to be some danger of getting into a circular argument here.

In dealing with Jesus, Wilson uses his novelist's imagination to try to
depict the man as opposed to the myth. As he says, this is difficult to
do, because the Gospel writers have different aims, a principal one
being to show how Jesus's sayings and actions fulfilled Scriptural
prophecies. The Evangelists seek to instruct and inspire the faithful,
not to write history. But with his novelist's eye Wilson seizes on small
details that they occasionally let slip and which he thinks allow us to
glimpse authentic events. And he is alert to places where the Gospels
hint at disagreements and arguments which we are not supposed to know
about: for example, between the followers of John the Baptist and the
early Christians, and between the followers of James, who adhered to the
Jewish view of Jesus, and the "Hellenizers" who took Paul's universalist
line.

To illustrate the way in which he thinks we should read the Gospels,
Wilson provides a detailed discussion of the feeding of the five
thousand. He is relatively uninterested in questions about the actual
occurrence of Jesus's miracles, preferring instead to investigate their
symbolic significance and the reasons why they are included in the
story. But he provides a new slant on some of them; for example, he
speculates that the wedding feast at which Jesus turned water into wine
may have been at the occasion of Jesus's own marriage. Whether or not
this is correct, it is a timely reminder to the reader that we do not
know whether Jesus was married; but if he was not, as Christians
generally assume, it would be rather surprising in a Jewish context.
Wilson also makes the valid point that, judging by some of his recorded
utterances, Jesus was rather unsympathetic to the idea of family life.

Wilson has no difficulty in demonstrating that the Gospel accounts of
the Nativity and of Jesus's childhood contain a large element of legend.
But the central act in the drama of the Gospels is, of course, Jesus's
trial and crucifixion, and Wilson finds numerous discrepancies and
inconsistencies in the narrative of these events too. As for the
Resurrection stories, he thinks we shall never know what happened but
suggests, rather tentatively, that the young man encountered by the
women at the empty tomb, and later interpreted as an angel, may have
been a member of a group who wished to take the body away for burial in
Galilee. The alleged sightings of Jesus himself after his crucifixion
may, Wilson thinks, have been of Jesus's brother James.

Wilson is a sensitive writer who has done his homework; he knows New
Testament Greek and is well read in the primary and secondary sources.
He also writes very well. His book is therefore worth reading by anyone
with an interest in the historical Jesus and how he was transformed
into the Saviour of mankind. Unsurprisingly, he does not provide any
answers to major questions, but he is consistently interesting and he
has some useful insights to contribute. And he is certainly right to say
that, in reading the Gospels, we must learn to think in a way that is
quite alien to the modern mind.